I’ve been thinking of this one for a while, and I have no idea. Can anybody help?
For a similar problem look here (although the Swedish word mentioned is downright silly in this context).
*The old Anglo-Saxons called the earth eorthe, meaning the ground, soil, earth. The Goths called it airþa and the Norsemen called it jorð. These all derive from Common Germanic *erthô. Germanic added a dental suffix -th, but other Indo-European languages don’t: Welsh ero ‘field’, Greek eras ‘earth’, and perhaps Armenian erkas. Old High German also has the form ero.
These are from the Proto-Indo-European extended forms *er-t-, *er-w-, from the root *er- ‘earth, ground’.
SDSTAFF Jill used a computer translator, but she should know how unreliable those gadgets are. You still have to check the results using a human brain. Maybe she was pressed for time that day.
French for the planet Earth is terre. The adjective mondial refers to ‘world(wide)’, e.g. la guerre mondiale, the World War.
The Russian word, transliterated from Cyrillic, which Jill’s software does not support, is zemlia.
When you translate ‘earth’ you have to know if you mean ‘soil, ground’ or ‘the world’. English uses the same word for both, but other languages use different words.
The Malay (Indonesian) word dunia means ‘world’, and their word for ‘earth’ is tanah. In Finnish, maa is ‘earth’ and ‘the world’ is maailma, a compound: ‘earth-air’.
and Eskomos (Initu?) have about 20 words for snow 
Perhaps I should point out that the word that SDSTAFF Jill had found in Swedish, mull, could be translated as earth (the common or garden variety, nowadays used almost only in funeral services), but The Earth is Jorden in Swedish.
I believe (or prefer to believe) that the original poster rather wanted to know whether or not the planet we inhibit is called the equivalent of ‘soil’ in other languages. This is indeed a rather interesting question. Why would one call the planet ‘soil’ even though the amount of fertile top-soil on our planet is so much lower than the amount of water or rock?
I beg to disagree with Jomo, as i all languages I speak, there is a word that means both soil and the-planet-we-live-on.
If I’m allowed to present my opinion, I’d guess that it’s because the people who invented the ancestors of our languages were farmers, and the most substantial substance underneath them would indeed be soil. Over the eons the sense of this ‘terra firma’ evolved to include not only the dirt used to grow potatoes, but extended to include everything under the firmament. Later the astronomers on their hand restricted the meaning to the now familiar ‘the-planet-we-live-on’ sense one finds in dictionaries. It would be interesting to try to follow this shift of meanings over the ages, but unfortunatelly my copy of OED is on loan, and I dread that this shift occured in those horrible days when they not only didn’t have the Internet, but they didn’t even have any writing. I appreciate the findings of Jomo, and it does indeed seem as if the two meanings planet and soil have a long history together in the indo-european history.
Are there cultures where agriculture hasn’t been as important as in the indo-european history? If so, maybe they might call the planet something else. Assuming that the planet sense has evolved slowly, maybe it would still mean something else as well. Maybe to some mountain dwellers somewhere the indigenous word for mountain got stuck as a label for the whole boulder?
Jomo, does dunia in Malay have any other connotations?
On Venus it is referred to as “ze erz.” I know this from watching “Queen of Outer Space,” in which Zsa Zsa Gabor says, “ze schpacemen are here from ze erz, dahling.”
There is a SF short story based on this:
Some guy bets another that the Earth (our Earth) is the prettiest planet, and that every species knows it. Bet accepted, Mr. Guy goes up to an alien and asks: “Hey, Alien is earth the prettiest planet?” in the alien language. The alien answers yes and the guy wins the bet.
However, he played on the fact that when the alien heard “earth” he would think it referred to the alien’s planet, not Earth.
I believe it might have been Heinlein in “The Green Hills of Earth.”
Actually the short story in question is “Lulungomeena” by Gordon R. Dickson. In the native tongue of the protaganist, Lulungomeena means “home” so yes, indeed, Home is the most beautiful place in the Universe.
Dunya is an Arabic loan word. I don’t know the etymology, although I am sure JM can track it down throught he root dal noun ya.
However, I am fairly certain it has no soil connection. My sense is the word carries metaphysical connotations.
The root dâl-nûn-yâ’ is for not only nouns, as you implied, but for verbs and adjectives as well. It means both ‘near’ and ‘low’, like the fruit on the lower branches of a tree which you can easily reach up and pick. The cosmic tree is a symbol in many cultures. The “Near East” in Arabic is called *al-Sharq al-Adná from the same root.
You’re right about that. The idea is of this life contrasted with al-âkhirah, the Afterlife. Originally the meaning of this term was eschatological, but moderns use it to mean the globe of the world.
Early peoples didn’t really deal with the concept of the Earth as a planet out in space. Earth meant the ground. When you’re looking up at the stars your feet are on the ground. The earth. It took the Copernican model to establish this here place as a planet like other planets. So when English speakers needed to file this planet along with the others, they called it what they had been used to calling it pre-Copernicus.
When I was looking up the words for fire, water, air, and earth in many languages I kept finding words for ‘world’ when I was really looking for earth in the sense of soil or land. I think that’s a modern confusion caused by languages casting about for a name to call the Copernican Planet Earth. English settled on the word for soil, but other languages seem to have equated it with “world,” even if the latter is originally a metaphysical concept.
STOP THAT!!!
I have Pepsi all over my monitor. 
[sub]Note to self: do not read the Straight Dope message boards while drinking[/sub]
Thanks for the correction. Still does not ring a bell, though. I hate being 40!
The Old English (West Saxon) word, “eorthe” refers to the soil, the gritty dirt itself, and by extension this has come to mean our planet. The English word is rooted strongly in the word for dirt itself. The sound of “eorthe,” at least to my ear at least, conveys the essense of soil.
We chatted about Jill’s column when it first came out: Foreign-language names for our planet.
The poster formerly known as jti.
Well, they wouldn’t let God take it home from the hospital unless there was a name on the birth certificate, so he was really pressed for time, and “earth” was the best he could think of.
Well, then, that begs the question - couldn’t He come up with a better name for the moon besides ‘the moon’?